I picked up the new Windows Phone over the weekend. It's been a long time coming and it's even better than I expected (and I'm not saying that because I work for Microsoft). The UI is responsive and very well thought out. The AMOLED screen is really nice...

Every now and then I see articles about Australia's "brain drain" where university educated people leave Australia for overseas jobs. I am one of those people. 6 months has turned into 12 years in the US and now I work for Microsoft in Seattle. I do miss...

The latest crop of automotive Garmin GPS devices integrate Microsoft's MSN Direct service which transmits data like traffic, weather, movie times, gas prices, news...etc. over FM waves. I've been using it around Seattle and it's pretty cool - for example...

Today we launched Office Accounting 2008 for the US and UK markets. We are also releasing a US Spanish version. Similar to Office Accounting 2007, Office Accounting 2008 includes the free Express versions of the product. As I blogged about previously...

I see questions about whether Office Accounting 2007 will be released outside the US on a daily basis (especially from my fellow countrymen in Australia, and from folks in Canada and the UK) so hopefully this will help set things straight. Microsoft...

For the last three years I have been working on the Office Accounting team; specifically on the user interface. We shipped Office Small Business Accounting 2006 over a year ago and just shipped its successor: Office Accounting 2007 which now comes in...

It's been a long while since I blogged so it's about time I pumped some life back into this thing. I was loading up the latest build of Vista on one of my machines recently and noticed that the Snipping Tool is now part of Vista. The OS version is feature...

Now that SP2 has been released, you can finally download the Tablet PC SDK v1.7 .

I thought this might be useful to people running XP or later. Every so often I need to know what process has locked a DLL because a delete or similar operation failed. In such cases I always turn to tasklist.exe, the command line version of the Windows...

With Sasser and friends out there, it seems like a chicken and egg scenario when trying to download patches for a vulnerable new system, if you're unlucky as Loren Heiny explains you'll be infected before you can even download and install the updates...

As some of you may know I created the Snipping Tool power toy for the Tablet PC and an update is due to be released some time this summer (northern hemisphere). Being so close to the release of XP SP2 and thus the free update to the Tablet operating...

If you develop for Windows XP and want to take advantage of Tablet PC specific features when your application is run on a tablet, there's a simple way to find out. Just call the Win32 API GetSystemMetrics with the magic number 86: using System.Runtime...

If you develop applications for Windows XP, you should be interested in developing for the Tablet PC since any application that runs on Windows XP Professional will run on a tablet. With the release of the 2005 Edition of the Tablet PC OS and the associated...

I have seen several requests on the Tablet PC developer newsgroup and on gotdotnet.com about implementing fill functionality within ink strokes. Often the first attempt at implementing such an effect is to use actual ink but it quickly becomes obvious...

I have seen several requests on the Tablet PC developer newsgroup and on gotdotnet.com about implementing fill functionality within ink strokes. Often the first attempt at implementing such an effect is to use actual ink but it quickly becomes obvious that using ink strokes to fill a polygon is difficult, much like trying to color a picture with crayons and stay within the lines; not exactly a graphical technique suitable of the computer age....

I thought I'd give this blog thing a try. I think I'll primarily talk about developing rich client software for Windows, concentrating on managed WinForms with a special focus on Tablet PC development. For the Tablet PC: I wrote the Microsoft Snipping...